Field of view advantage of conjugate adaptive optics in microscopy applications

Abstract

The imaging performance of an optical microscope can be degraded by sample-induced aberrations. A general strategy to undo the effect of these aberrations is to apply wavefront correction with a deformable mirror (DM). In most cases, the DM is placed conjugate to the microscope pupil, called pupil adaptive optics (AO). When the aberrations are spatially variant, an alternative configuration involves placing the DM conjugate to the main source of aberrations, called conjugate AO. We provide theoretical and experimental comparison of both configurations for the simplified case where spatially variant aberrations are produced by a well defined phase screen. We pay particular attention to the resulting correction field of view (FOV). Conjugate AO is found to provide a significant FOV advantage. While this result is well known in the astronomy community, our goal here is to recast it specifically for the optical microscopy community.

11 pages, 10 figures

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Three-Dimensional Ultrasound Matrix Imaging
• Adaptive-glasses wavefront sensorless full-field OCT for high-resolution retinal imaging over a wide field-of-view
• Manifestation of aberrations in full-field optical coherence tomography
• Diffractive optical system design by cascaded propagation
• Spinning Pupil Aberration Measurement for anisoplanatic deconvolution
• Moment-based space-variant Shack-Hartmann wavefront reconstruction
• Model-based wavefront shaping microscopy
• Space-variant Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing based on affine transformation estimation
• Adaptive optics design for high-energy kW-class multi-slab laser amplifier